James Cameron compares Titan submarine and Titanic disasters: “Warnings went unheeded”
Avatar and Titantic director, James Cameron, has weighed in on the conversation surrounding the submersible vehicle Titan. According to US officials, it suffered a “catastrophic implosion” when deep in the ocean.
The Titan went missing on Sunday when it was carrying five passengers to the wreck of the Titanic, but the search has now ended after the US Coast Guard found it to have fatally imploded. The five victims were Hamish Harding, 58, Shahzada Dawood, 48, Suleman Dawood, 19, Paul-Henri Nargeolet, 77, and Stockton Rush, 61.
Notably, James Cameron has travelled to the site of the Titanic over 33 times. During an interview with ABC News, the director claimed that the company behind the Titan, OceanGate, ignored safety warnings. The director designed and built a submersible that travelled to one of the deepest points in the ocean, the Mariana Trench, something he says took his team three years to design before a long build and testing period.
Since the Titan went missing, the unconventional methods of OceanGate have been criticised. For example, it was driven using a video game controller. Cameron said: “Many people in the community were very concerned about this sub, and a number of the top players in the deep submergence engineering community even wrote letters to the company saying that what they were doing was too experimental to carry passengers, and it needed to be certified, and so on.”
The director then compared the Titan disaster to that of the Titanic. “I’m struck by the similarity of the Titanic disaster itself — where the captain was repeatedly warned about ice ahead of his ship, and yet he steamed at full speed into an ice field on a moonless night, and many people died as a result,” he continued.
Adding: “And for a very similar tragedy, where warnings went unheeded, to take place at the same exact site — with all the diving that’s going on, all around the world — I think is just astonishing. I think it’s really quite surreal.”
In an interview with the BBC, Cameron expanded on his comments. After those in the deep submergence community raised concerns about the OceanGate vehicle, he said the company was “going on a path to catastrophe” by not listening to them. He added: “We now have another wreck that is based on unfortunately the same principles of not heeding warnings”.
After the sub was lost, Cameron said he “felt in my bones” that it was lost. “I immediately got on the phone to some of my contacts in the deep submersible community. Within about an hour I had the following facts. They were on descent. They were at 3500 metres, heading for the bottom at 3800 metres,” he expressed.
“You can’t lose comms and navigation together without an extreme catastrophic event.”
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